Up@dawn 2.0

Friday, February 22, 2013

(Blog series 1 Midterm) Breaking your soul?

Informed he has terminal cancer, an underachieving chemistry genius turned high school teacher uses his expertise to secretly provide for his family by producing the world's highest quality crystal meth.

Heisenberg's Uncertain Confession:
Walt and Gretchen (a former girlfriend) are studying the chemical composition of the human body.

Hydrogen-63%
Oxygen-26%
Carbon-9%
Nitrogen-1.25%
Calcium-0.25%
Iron-0.00004%
Sodium-0.04%
Phosphorus -0.19%
Total= 99.888042%

Apparently, that's everything. What about the rest? Gretchen has a suggestion: "What about the soul?" she asks. But for Walt, a man of science, the soul is something completely foreign to his way of thinking. "There's nothing but chemistry here," Walt whispers to Gretchen dismissing her suggestion. Walt's flat dismissal, however doesn't explain the 0.111958 percent discrepancy the couple has uncovered.

Walt is a materialist when he disregards the existence of a soul. For Walt chemistry and matter is all of life. This perspective is one would want if you were shoveling soupy mess of your murder victim into a toilet. If you think about the world and your behavior strictly in terms of the rules that govern the behavior of your chemical components, you could convince yourself that you didn't decide to kill anyone, it was not your will, but the laws of nature that took the life recently ended.This allows you to believe that you do not choose to break bad; rather, bad and evil just happen.

If,however, chemistry is only able to account for 99.888042 percent of the human body, then this discrepancy represents a tiny, but important, hole in the materialist point of view. This shows that there is something that doesn't obey the law of nature and with the existence of a soul brings the notion of responsibility or culpability for one's actions along with guilt, pride, and redemption.

So we have two sides of the coin. On one side you have the materialist. On the other you have those who believe in a soul. Given the situation Walt is in, I can see the reasoning behind choosing not to believe in a soul. There would be since of responsibility or consequences for what you do, it's just apart of nature. I guess it comes down to are you willing to bet on that 99.888042%. Sure it seems like good odds but the stakes are high.


1 comment:

  1. Careful: some materialists also believe in "soul," just not of the immortal variety.

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